For what it's worth, one of modern China's most famous writers, Lu Xun, was adamantly in favor of eliminating the characters. Your question is by no means stupi

For what it's worth, one of modern China's most famous writers, Lu Xun, was adamantly in favor of eliminating the characters. Your question is by no means stupid. There are many reasons the characters have not been replaced by an alphabet. Ultimately, it comes down to the weight of tradition. Chinese has had basically the same writing system for 2000+ years. The characters are deeply embedded in Chinese culture, and the structure of the language itself is closely bound up with the characters. Only young kids use the alphabet, as a stepping stone to learning the characters, so proposing to use the alphabet comes across as if you want to dumb down the language. There are over a billion people who have learned how to read/write the characters, so the system has huge inertia and buy-in. As others have noted, this is like switching from imperial to metric, but a million times harder and emotionally fraught.